Wales 0-73 South Africa
PRINCIPALITY STADIUM — Predictably and painfully, Wales were routed by South Africa in a pathetic spectacle of rugby, dressed up as a Test match, and attached to the end of the Autumn Nations Series like a fleck of chewing gum stuck on your heel as you stagger home from a session that went on too long.
Some kind of pre-Covid agreement was blamed for playing this match, delayed from 2020, and now held outside the three-week November international window.
It meant Wales were shorn of a dozen top players away at their English and French clubs, when they could have lost none and probably still have been well beaten by the awesome world champions, who were missing a batch of superstars of their own but were spearheaded by the shimmering fly-half Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu and a devastating scrum.
pic.twitter.com/IuhYhWIZQq
— Rugby on TNT Sports (@rugbyontnt) November 29, 2025Instead of a grab for cash from the 50,112-strong crowd who turned up in Cardiff, boosted by thousands of South African ex-pats, the organisers could have left the inevitable entry in the record books unwritten.
Instead, it is occupied by fresh Welsh hell.
The proud Principality Stadium has already been a pit of despair this year, with the autumn comprising a tight win over Japan sandwiched by heavy losses to Argentina and New Zealand – and now this.
It was Wales’s heaviest home defeat, eclipsing the March humbling when England won here 68-14.
And it was also their first nil on home soil since Ireland won 3-0 in Cardiff in 1967 – but that was a day when both teams struggled to score, utterly different to this romp of 11 tries for the Springboks, who were a mere 28-0 up by half-time and then decided to make an effort.
The grimness was concluded by a red card to the 141-cap South African icon Eben Etzebeth for unnecessarily planting his thumb into the eye of Wales flanker Alex Mann during an off-the-ball grapple.
South Africa’s Eben Etzebeth clashes with Wales’ Alex Mann, later resulting in a red card (Photo: Reuters)The upside, in theory, is the WRU have made money out of this, and some of that goes to the four regional teams.
But rugby politics in Wales is a mess, with no agreement on which teams, and how many of them, and with what kind of ownership, there should be.
The WRU’s view is they can’t just chuck in the domestic game, and let all the top players leave, even if a version of that works for Argentina.
Among many other knots to unpick is who will take the vacant place in the URC if Wales trims from four representative teams to three – there is chat of anyone from South Africa’s Cheetahs, Ebbw Vale stepping up from Super Rugby Cymru, or Ealing from England being asked to step in.
The recently appointed Wales head coach Steve Tandy argued after this thrashing for “targeted coaching”, and more games, and building – but what else could he say?
For the rest of us, it was inevitable to look back.
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This reporter was present at two previous editions of this fixture, in Pretoria in 1998 and Cardiff in 1999.
The first was a different variety of nightmare as a full-strength, world-champion South Africa ripped apart a partly third-string Wales, 96-13. The full Wales team had been hammered 51-0 by France at Wembley a few weeks beforehand, so it was not out of character.
Twelve months later in the inaugural match at the then Millennium Stadium, Wales beat South Africa 29-19.
And since then, Wales changed their system from clubs to regions, they won Grand Slams and reached two semi-finals of the World Cup.
So the moral of this story could be the night is darkest before the dawn, and Wales can harness the lingering love for the game in the country.
The reactions of the Welsh spectators indicated they didn’t blame the players for this mess.
They cheered a kick for a line-out close to the Boks’ goalline, with 53 minutes gone, and Wales down by 54-0. But the red jerseys crashed through umpteen phases, making not a millimetre of ground before they were turned over by Andre Esterhuizen, who was also a curse on the gainline in the opposite direction.
Four minutes from the end, there were oohs and aahs as the Wales wing Elliot Mee made a gutsy chase of a hack ahead, without success.
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But there is a more dystopian view. Of a country where the players and the public give up, and the glory days never return.
Former greats Jon Davies, Dan Biggar, Sam Warburton and Jamie Roberts strolled around the pitch on their media duties, like ghosts of good times past.
The empty seats ranged around the stadium’s upper tier looked like a tide that hadn’t come in, and the worry is if this semi-apathy becomes a rot.
Rassie Erasmus, the South Africa head coach, had played in both the 1998 and 1999 matches referenced above. He said after this one: “The Welsh are in between what they want to do, they have a really great coach, and it will come right.” He also said he had no defence of Etzebeth over the red card.
The second statement was a lot easier to believe in than the first.
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